Your next PC, phone or console costs more because of AI: how the memory crisis reaches you

How much prices have risen

In a single quarter (the first of 2026), contract prices for conventional DRAM rose between 93% and 98% on the quarter before, according to TrendForce, which had to revise its own forecast upwards twice in two months. PC memory took the worst of it, with a rise of more than 100% in one quarter — the biggest jump on record — and server memory came in around 90%. Put in shop terms: analysts were already taking it for granted that 2026 would be the year of the $500 32 GB DDR5 module.

One distinction gets lost almost every time, so let’s nail it down here. There are two prices for memory, and they’re not the same. The contract price is the one manufacturers negotiate each quarter with their big customers: it’s the one that ends up on your laptop’s price tag, and it’s the one behind that 93–98%. The spot price is the daily market, small lots between middlemen: it moves earlier, it moves far more, and it’s not the price you pay. TrendForce itself warns that spot “is not the best indicator” and that contract is the one to watch. Both are going up. Spot goes up more, and spot is what Chart 3 shows.

And there’s a second victim almost nobody connects to this: storage. It needs spelling out, because people mix them up: RAM is one kind of chip (DRAM) and an SSD is another (NAND). Different chips, made by the same companies, and AI is taking both. The result: a 30 TB enterprise SSD that cost $3,460 in the third quarter of 2025 now runs about $22,600, roughly six and a half times more in a year. The mechanical hard drive (HDD) has not escaped either: the 30 TB drive went from $495 to $1,216 over the same period, up 146%, two and a half times. Less than the SSD, but not a little. Even so, the gap between the two is now so wide that the enterprise SSD costs almost 19 times more per terabyte than the hard drive, against 7 times a year ago. This isn’t a technical footnote: for a photographer, for anyone editing video, for anyone keeping their memories and files, the SSD has become much more expensive, and the old mechanical drive is still the least bad way to archive — even if it’s no longer cheap.

How we got here, in three steps

1. AI sends demand for high-end accelerator memory through the roof, and that memory eats factory capacity: HBM takes about four times more wafer area per gigabyte than ordinary memory, and it is already heading for 22% of DRAM wafer consumption.
2. Manufacturers redirect their wafers to whatever leaves the best margin: HBM and server DRAM.
3. The end consumer competes for what’s left, and pays the difference.

Why competition isn’t fixing it

Here is the question everyone asks: if demand is this strong, why don’t more memory factories appear and end the problem? Because this market is a textbook oligopoly. Three companies split almost all of it: in the first quarter of 2026, Samsung held 38% of the DRAM market, SK Hynix 29% and Micron 22%. Between them, 89%. And building a new plant is beyond almost anyone: it costs between $15 billion and $20 billion, it needs lithography machines made by a single supplier (the Dutch firm ASML) and it takes years to reach full output. Nobody has broken into consumer DRAM in decades; the last serious attempt, Japan’s Elpida, went bankrupt and ended up inside Micron in 2013. That moat spares the three of them from competing on price. So much so that in 2026 a class action in the United States accuses them of restricting supply to hold prices up (which they deny).

What it means for you, product by product

• Computers and laptops. Memory and the SSD are the components rising fastest. The analyst firm IDC expects the average PC price to rise 18.3% in 2026 (it revised its first forecast, which topped out at 8%, upwards), with shipments falling 11.3%: fewer computers sold, but more expensive ones, to the point where the market grows 1.6% by value.
• Consoles. All three of the big players have moved, and all three cite the component crisis. Sony raised the whole PlayStation range in April 2026 (the model with the disc drive to $649.99 and the PS5 Pro to $899.99) and backtracked on 21 August, taking them to $549.99 and $749.99 respectively; Microsoft put the Xbox Series X at $799.99; and Nintendo is raising the Switch 2 from $449.99 to $499.99 on 1 September. That Sony was able to reverse its rise qualifies the story: the pressure from memory is real, but not every price rise is explained by it alone.
• Phones. Manufacturers pass on the same cost; Apple has already made the iPad almost 29% more expensive, and the hardest hit is the base model, the one most people buy: from $349 to $449. And it is coming for the company’s best-selling product: as Bloomberg reported on 23 August 2026, the whole iPhone 18 range will go up by around $100, with the Pro starting at $1,199. The reason, again, is memory. TrendForce puts numbers on it: the bill of materials for a 256 GB iPhone 18 Pro is up around 38% year on year, and memory has gone from about 10% of that cost a year ago to around 34%, heading past 40% in the first half of 2027.
• Storage. SSDs (NAND) through the roof: 6.5 times in a year. The mechanical hard drive (HDD) rises less, 2.5 times, but it rises too: there is no cheap shelter, only a less expensive one.
• Even the kitchen speaker. On 21 August 2026, Amazon raised the US prices of its device range overnight and without an announcement: the Echo Dot went from $49 to $79 (up 60%), the 16 GB Kindle from $109.99 to $149.99, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max from $59.99 to $84.99. The company explained it to Fortune in these words: “significant increases in memory and storage component costs”, which it says it absorbed as long as it could before passing them on.

When to buy and when to wait

The short answer: if you need to buy or add memory or storage, do it soon. No serious forecast sees relief before the second half of 2027, and SK Hynix has gone as far as warning that the shortage could run past 2030. In storage, if all you need is somewhere to put files, the mechanical hard drive is the cheapest thing there is, even though it too now costs two and a half times what it did a year ago. Waiting, this time, doesn’t pay.

What the people who think it corrects sooner say

Part of the rise is hoarding and contracts that could loosen; storage (NAND), in fact, is showing signs of easing before memory (DRAM) does, as soon as 2027. This is the minority position, and it’s presented as one, without being artificially levelled with the dominant view.